Trump and Election Denial

“You can’t prove a negative” is a truism and the stock-in-trade of Joseph Fried, a certified public accountant publishing his second book claiming Donald Trump won in 2020. Ballot harvesting? It occurred, all now agree. Prove it wasn’t a vehicle for tampering with the vote. Rejection rates for mail-in ballots were a tiny fraction of those in previous elections despite a vast increase in first-time mail voters. Prove fraud didn’t occur.

Mr. Trump didn’t invent election denial, as much as Democrats wish to forget Stacey Abrams, Hillary Clinton, and numerous congressional Democrats in the George W. Bush years. It will pain many to hear it but his pre-Jan. 6 activities were very much the expected Trump circus—after all, he told us what to expect in 2016—until the Capitol Police failed to do the one job they have.

Mr. Trump was near the mark on one matter: Mail-in ballots are an incitement to people like Mr. Trump because of their inferior security. Doubly so when mail votes are a high multiple of the margin of victory in close races, when it’s already easy to argue plausibly that behind-the-scenes fiddling, late rule changes or last-minute FBI actions changed the outcome. Don’t kid yourself about something else: Both parties now routinely plan to keep fighting every election after Election Day.

Is straining the law to prosecute Mr. Trump criminally, an argument even heard from some conservatives, the way to put the election-denial genie back in the bottle? In pursuing Mr. Trump, special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Ga., prosecutors may end up only vindicating the original reluctance of the Biden FBI and Justice Department to go down this road, not least because the mother of all election denials may be waiting should Mr. Trump win next year.

The Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, herself a former Trump aide, spoke for many when she declared two years ago a Trump win in 2024—legally, democratically, in line with voter wishes—means “democracy’s done” in America. A small hop brings us to this week’s pundit horde, based on a constitutional argument they heard for the first time yesterday, ardently insisting state election officials have the power to remove Mr. Trump from their ballots for “insurrection” without trial or formal evidence.

This is the delusion of all delusions. Nothing remotely good can come from trying at this late date to ban a man who got 74 million votes in 2020, who is the declared favorite of tens of millions in 2024.

For one thing, it gives too easy a pass to the many co-authors of our mess, especially the media. Worse than a crime, a very avoidable blunder it turns out was the establishment’s gift to Mr. Trump of his greatest argument: Why should I believe the collusion promoters when they tell me now 2020 was on the up and up?

Murking things up further is everything we’ve learned about the alleged Trump antidote, Joe Biden. It seems believable that Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, was the real author of the family business model, which had him flaunting Hunter around the Obama White House so Hunter could bilk millions from foreign influence seekers.

When the laptop surfaced on the eve of the 2020 vote, Mr. Biden may have feared not just embarrassment but exposure. What followed the establishment won’t easily live down: Ex-intelligence officers concocting a lie about the Kremlin to protect the Bidens. Democrats pouring $60 million into promoting extreme MAGA candidates in the 2022 GOP primaries to save control of the Senate. Mr. Biden, in terror lest Democratic progressives blow the whistle on his corruption, appeasing them by playing up the white-supremacist menace. And now, as even the New York Times is willing to notice, Democratic prosecutors around the country pulling out every stop to shove Mr. Trump down the throats of GOP primary voters over other possible candidates.

Listen to Hunter’s lawyers when they say he deserves special treatment from the Biden Justice Department precisely because he may be a target soon of the Trump Justice Department. This is where the two likeliest nominees are taking us. When the weaponization of the justice system is on the table, to use the unavoidable phrase, suddenly our elections can’t be about anything else.

Beating all, for me, is the failure of any prominent figure to pull on their big-boy pants, the lack of any bipartisan wise person to sit up and say the collusion hoax, FBI meddling in 2016 and 2020, Mr. Trump’s own stop-the-steal hoax, are all one sickness.

The odor of the Stavisky affair in pre-war France—look it up—arises from our elite. Mr. Trump’s apogee of election denialism surely requires an answer. It begins, however, with Mr. Biden stepping aside and making way for some Democrat who by word or at least implication is willing to lead the country’s repudiation of the Hillary elites and their Trumpian antagonists, who turn out to be the worst generation of Americans in living memory.